Glimmer

Ghostly;
2011

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In a December review for Wire, British critic Joe Muggs explored the way Berlin producer Anstam uses technology to emulate acoustic instruments-- and then, push those sounds to places that actual players in an orchestra could never go. Muggs invokes the concepts of "uncanny valley" and "trompe l'oreille," related phrases describing the phenomenon of fabricated artifacts and intelligences mimicking "real life" to the point of being indistinguishable. "The dividing line between the physical and digital worlds is fast fading away," Muggs writes in a prelude of praise for Anstam's Dispel Dances, "in the process posing new questions about our relationship to what we’re hearing." Most of Muggs' fascination with Anstam appropriately stems from a sense of wonder, or imagining the possibilities of a set of computers refined enough to make digital music sound as though it were recorded in a studio but play music beyond the capabilities of human hands. It's a post-milliennial update of Conlon Nancarrow's player-piano rolls, where the human becomes the controller, if not the hands-on creator.

Glimmer, the new album by Polish producer Michał Jacaszek, takes a much different path to a very similar sort of intrigue. Jacaszek has long operated at artistic thresholds. His 2009 album, Pentral, for instance, seemed like an attempt to be as brutal and beautiful as possible. Without notice, he'd burst from near-silent calm into speaker-splitting tones. If that sounds off-putting, Pentral thankfully played more like an attempt to dismiss a binary than to bait and cruelly switch. For Glimmer, Jacaszek combines a real-time ensemble-- here, harpsichordist Małgosia Skotnicka, clarinetist Andrzej Wojciechowski, and himself on acoustic guitar and metallophone-- with his own web of electroacoustic effects.

Jacaszek possesses the soft programming touch of Christian Fennesz. Sensitive and slight, his electronics suggest a layer of lace sitting softly above patches of sculpted debris. As a composer with this small group, Jacaszek recalls recent romantics like Texas' excellent Balmorhea and Sweden's delicate Tape; the music is often pretty but not cloyingly so, meaning that there's space for foreboding and worry between the oboe's lifts and the harpsichord's fanciest runs. Rather than simply process previously recorded sounds, he smartly trusses those qualities, shaping an album that feels like some science-fiction waking dream. In an atmosphere that's very pleasant but vaguely eerie, the humans and the robots interact, each occasionally slipping behind the cover of the other. Jacaszek's again craftily corroded another binary.

Glimmer's nine tracks work best as a whole, built with hard-won peaks and long-sloped valleys that disappear into the distance. As the album progresses, Jacaszek hints at previous themes and ideas, using a classical trope to earn a sense of cohesion. It works, too, making the 41 minutes between the repetition that opens "Goldengrove" and the granulated whirr that signals the exit of "Windhover" seem compulsory. But there are remix-ready instrumentals here, too, from the Burial-like stasis of the gorgeous "Dare-Gale" to the swollen majesty at the center of "As Each Tucked String Tells". Think of Glimmer as a little symphony, just with singles, and made by a musician who can't decide between the roles of producer or composer. Really, he shouldn't anytime soon.